Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin (4 page)

I went up behind her and cleared my throat. She moved back against me and pressed, then looked up over her shoulder, smiling. I thrust her away. She turned and looked at me along her eyes.

“I’m wearing a skirt,” she said. “See.”

“I see.”

Her eyes were sly. The skirt was tight and dark blue. She had on a white blouse. She still wore the sandals.

“Would you want a speaker out back, too?” I said. “So it’ll cover the yard, in case you’re out there?”

She said, “Skirts are better.” Then she whispered, “You tore my pants all to hell.” She held her right palm against her leg on the skirt and dragged her palm upward. The thin skirt came with it, sliding against the white flesh until her thigh was bare to the hip. “See?”

I began to sweat. “The speaker,” I said. “In the back yard.”

She spoke normally, holding the skirt up. She moved her hip a little. “I was going to ask you about that, Mr. Ruxton. We may as well do a complete job while we’re at it.”

“Sure thing.” I shot a glance at his bedroom door. The door was closed. I looked back at her and her face had changed. Her expression was bad. She let the skirt fall down.

She turned without looking at me and headed straight for her bedroom, walking as softly as a cat. I followed her. She went into the bedroom and I stepped just inside the door. The room was at the rear of the house, opposite the kitchen. It was all done in pink, with ruffles, and it smelled of her perfume.

She looked at me. “I feel as if I’ve known you for a long while.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it, Jack.”

It was the first time she’d called me Jack. No one else had ever said it quite that way, in just that tone of voice.

She sat down at the foot of the bed and leaned against the mahogany bedpost, and wrapped her hands around it, staring at the floor.

“Jack,” she said. “I can’t stand it.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, staring at the floor, and neither did I. Then she said, “I’ve got to talk to somebody about it. It’s driving me out of my mind.”

I waited. She kept on staring at the floor. There was a tenseness in the very look of her, and it had been revealed in her tone. Whatever it was, she didn’t really want to talk about it. You could see her struggle against herself. But she knew she would lose.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

Well, I began to really know, then. Before, I’d felt as if I might have read her wrong. Now I was sure about her. It could have been the mailman, the milkman, even Doctor Miraglia. Anybody. Then I thought, No, don’t get it wrong. You happened to be here and you saw it in her, and she knows you saw it. Somebody else might have missed it. Only I might never know exactly what it was that had tipped me.

“I’m scared to death, Jack.” She stared at the wall, looking toward the other side of the house. “He lies there. He’s dying.” She paused. I’d been right. She was pulling something up out of her that had been sealed and locked in dark secret compartments for a long time. Every word seemed to be painful. “It goes on and on,” she said. “It may go on for years and years. The doctor told me that.”

“You’ve got it pretty soft. Why kick?”

She looked at me and for a second hate shot out of her eyes. Her voice was tight and sibilant. “Soft? For three years I’ve done this.” It was tearing her apart to tell it. But the need was overwhelming. “Three long horrible years. You call that having it soft?”

I shrugged.

“You wonder why I do it,” she said. And now the bitterness. “Isn’t it obvious?”

I shrugged again.

“Well, isn’t it?”

I still didn’t speak.

She let go of the bedpost and sat very stiffly. Then she began rocking slightly forward and backward, rubbing her hands tightly against her thighs.

“Why not leave?” I said. “You can get a job.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s leaving me everything when he dies, that’s why. All his money. Everything.” She swallowed tightly. “He thinks I’m the only friend he’s ever had—something. I don’t know. It’s crazy. I can’t leave—I can’t.”

My throat felt dry. “It won’t last forever.”

“Any time is forever. Right now is forever the way I feel.”

She stood up, staring at me.

I said, “It’s a lot of money?”

She pressed both hands against the side of her face and said, “Yes.”

“If he were in a hospital, you’d be free. You wouldn’t have to worry about this. Only you don’t want him in a hospital. Do you.”

“No.”

“Why, Shirley?’

“I just don’t, that’s all.”

“Yes. But, why?”

“I just don’t. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of him. I promised.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not the reason. Think, Shirley. Why don’t you want Victor Spondell put away in a hospital?”

She tried to speak, but nothing came past her lips. She didn’t want to hear herself say it. Her eyes were dark now, the pupils large and black, staring from the strange pallor of her face.

“I’ll tell you why,” I said. “It’s because Victor might live on and on for a long, long time, and you couldn’t do anything to prevent it. You couldn’t get at him in a hospital. That’s why.”

She lunged at me and slapped my face. She slapped it again, striking savagely. She was crying, sobbing. I grabbed her wrists and tried to hold her. She fought like a wild Indian.

“It’s the truth,” I said. “Face it.”

“No!”

She wrenched one hand loose and raked her nails down the side of my neck. I grabbed the wrist again and held on. She squirmed and writhed and kicked. Her face was wrung with fright. She was crying inside, but there were no tears in her eyes.

“Get out!” she said. “Get away from me. Leave me alone, you dirty bastard. Get out of here and stay away from me.”

I thrust her slowly back toward the bed, fighting with her every inch of the way, and gave her a shove. She landed on her back and lay suddenly still. She looked beautiful to me then, lying there; beautiful and hot and mad.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll get out.”

I turned and walked from the bedroom, across the living room, and out the front door. I closed the screen door gently, then went out to the truck and drove quickly away.

I waited a week. The thought of losing her now had me crazy. I couldn’t think of anything but Shirley Angela. Days and nights crawled and crept. It was the longest week I’d ever spent in my life and she was with me every minute in my mind, like a ripe taunt. But if she thought I would run to her, she was wrong. This time she had to come to me. I didn’t go near her place. I lashed the tarp over the hoops above the truck-bed, and covered the TV sets and the other stuff inside with a couple of quilts. I told Pete Stallsworth to leave everything just as it was, and not to use that truck, because I was waiting for a call. I prayed she would call.

She was right about time being forever.

Now was forever. My whole life had been forever up until I met Shirley Angela. All the things I’d thought meant something, really meant nothing.

There were the years as a kid on the farm in Louisiana, watching my old man grub and get drunk and thrash around, until the old woman started getting drunk, too, so she could stand it, until he finally ran off with a fat whore who sang “Roll me over, lay me down, and do it again,” in a carnival sideshow. And along about then I ran away, maybe emulating my old man, with a girl named Tess who met a slickhaired mulatto in New Orleans and dropped me. Sixteen and mad at everybody. Working at anything I could get, taking anything I could lay my hands on. And then Ginny, making me go back to school, sweet as honey—hit by a truck and killed outright with me watching from the curb, in Memphis. Something happened to me then. I could never figure it. I didn’t give a goddamn what happened. I felt mean and lowdown. I reckoned I would take the world by the tail and kick it smack in the ass. Only it worked the other way around, all through the years of night school, the war, the drinking and the dames, the brief spell of gas station hoisting, and the cornet blowing in the jive joints, right up to the television school, and finally the store, and Grace. All the time maybe looking for Ginny. I don’t know. Maybe thinking I’d found her again in Shirley Angela.

Only knowing I’d found what I really wanted instead.

Because Shirley Angela was for me—she was mine.

Along with something else that was beginning to eat holes in me.

Shirley Angela. Just like that. And all the rest of the love-guff just a mess of words. With me, that’s how it was. You either understand or you don’t.

If you ever had it like this, you understand.

Nothing happened. Over one hundred and sixty-eight hours of complete vacuum, with me riding the hands of the clock. Just holding my breath.

Grace called twice. I hung up on her both times. She worried me. I knew she was priming herself all the time, and eventually something would happen, but I couldn’t let myself think about that. Not till I could angle something. Grace had been terrific while it lasted. She was a tall, blonde dish, and she’d been in the process of getting a divorce when I met her one evening at the store. She bought a phonograph. She looked good. We talked ourselves into a date for the next night, and after that things were underway with what you might call a bang.

She would say, “Jack, I’ve been married for five years. Believe it or not. I feel as if I’ve been dead all that time.”

“You’re not dead,” I’d say. “Take it from me.”

And she would laugh. I didn’t realize she was serious, possessive, watchful—suspicious. She was fun. In the beginning. She’d always had enough money, she still had plenty to get along with, even though she didn’t tag the ex-husband for alimony. We had a hot time for a while. I told her I went for her in a big way. I was really just trying to make her happy. She didn’t know that. I didn’t think it mattered.

It mattered.

She began to haunt me. On the phone. At the store. At the apartment. She wanted to be with me every minute. She crawled. About that time, I didn’t want to be with her at all. She wasn’t fun anymore.

“When you going to ask me to marry you?” she’d say. Only she meant it. It was all she thought of. She was neurotic, searching for the perfect husband-lover-understander. I’d played it all wrong. I told her so. I cursed her. I hit her. Nothing did any good. Sometimes she scared me, the way she acted, the wild things she said.

And lately, the phone calls, stopping me in the street. “I’ll kill myself. I mean it, Jack. You can’t treat me this way. You love me. You told me you loved me.”

Jesus! She’d been married wrong once; she would never learn.

I was at the apartment when the phone rang. I thought it was Grace again. It was Shirley Angela. It was like getting everything you’d ever wanted, all in one lump.

“I phoned the store. They finally gave me your apartment number.”

“Don’t do that again.”

“I’ve got to see you.”

“All right.” I tried to sound calm.

“It’s four-thirty now. The doctor will be here in a few minutes. I’ll come to your place.”

“No.”

Her voice was strained. “I’ve got to see you.” She paused and I didn’t speak, and she said, “You were right, Jack. Of course, you were right.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to go back to the store for a while. I won’t be free till six.”

“That’s a whole hour and a half from now.”

“One hundred and sixty-eight and a half hours, total.”

Silence.

“That doesn’t give me much time,” she said. “Doctor Miraglia said he can’t stay long tonight.”

I made no comment.

“Where shall I meet you?” she said.

“Drive out to Maximo Point, on the bay. Take the boulevard until it bears right. You’ll see a brick street to the left. Keep on that till it quits. There’s a sulphur spring down there. I’ll see you.”

“I know the place. Jack, are you angry?”

“No. I was, but I’m not anymore. Are you all right?”

“I will be.”

I didn’t have to go down to the store, and I couldn’t figure what made me tell her that. I wished I hadn’t. I wanted to see her so bad I couldn’t even think, and if the days had seemed a long while before she called, it was really beginning to stretch now.

I took the car and drove out to Maximo Point and waited. The sun hung low over the Gulf. I was parked by the sea wall under a sprawling live oak, and the late afternoon was quiet, with only the occasional distant scream of a gull. I sat there, more nervous with every minute. I heard a car.

She was driving. It was only a little after five, which told me the condition I was in. Maybe she had known I didn’t have to go to the store. The car was a new Imperial sedan, sleek and black. She rocked it to a stop beside me, ran around, opened the door of my car, and jumped in. She closed the door and sat there.

She looked straight ahead at the windshield, with her chin up a little. I didn’t say anything and she didn’t look at me. Then she spoke, her voice soft and hesitant and shaded with resignation.

“All right,” she said. “You win. You were right.”

“What do I win?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “It was a shock, having you tell me what I was thinking, like that. To my face.”

“You were pretty obvious.”

She sat stiffly. “I didn’t mean to be.”

Looking at her, I felt the lust crawling in me, a kind of liquid heat that spread in my loins. She was soft and eager, and hungry for life. It made her more vital to me, and I knew I would go through a lot to have that always. I didn’t care what she was.

“Why me?” I said. “I’m a stranger to you.”

“You’re very quaint, dear.”

“All right. How can you trust me?”

“What is there to trust? You mean I should be afraid of you going to Victor with what you think? Or perhaps suggesting things to the police?” She turned on the seat, regarding me coolly. “That would be a laugh, Victor would very likely hit you over the head with an oxygen tank.” She paused and a smile touched the corners of her lips. “Besides, if he didn’t, I would.”

“No hokum. This is serious.”

She said nothing for a moment. Her eyes were steady and cool. “Listen,” she said. “I’m going to be serious. I think we understand each other very well, Jack. I mean by that, I don’t believe either of us have any illusions concerning morality. Am I right?”